As restaurants and other industries expand into national and global markets, they have increased problems with their equipment running properly. Regardless of whether the failures relate to communication, education, installation, manufacturing, design, or service issues, the growing companies experiencing these failures have become increasingly vulnerable to food or product safety problems. The current technology available simply cannot handle their needs. Typically a facility will require on-site diagnosis, evaluation, and feedback which costs increasing amounts in order to do business. A company with thousands of individual locations has no realistic way of implementing a Zero Defect Program with existing technologies, absent a complete re-engineering of and homogenization of each individual facility. The term "Zero Defect" for such a company having multiple locations means that during no appreciable time period its thousands of locations will not have a piece of equipment down or out of specification. When a malfunction occurs, the "Zero Defect" system insures that the equipment will be back in service within a specified time and incur a known amount of cost. A system which currently gives these benefits is not available, but is acutely needed in the growing restaurant industry.
This aspect of being able to handle Zero Defects gives control to the quality assurance function. If a particular location cannot serve any products or cannot serve a product from a particular piece of equipment, quality assurance suffers. As companies expand, they lose more control over their equipment and departmental cohesion. In the company organization, failures in equipment can be debilitating and costly. Without some effective and low cost way to manage these pieces of equipment, the equipment owners are subject to excess losses, potential danger to the public, and creation of an internal debilitating atmosphere of indecision and meaningless blame assessment.
Serving food products from defective equipment can have far reaching, sometimes deadly consequences. Not only can such an instance cause corporations in product costs and legal expenses, but they can damage their customer base with a single food problem.
To solve some of these problems, companies have put in alarm systems that call quality assurance for problems with a single scalar quantity, such as temperature. A thousand locations with thousands of pieces of equipment that are unknowingly on the brink of failure can result in a major disaster. With all these pieces of equipment in questionable health, you have to dispatch repair personnel to each location to have them determine if the problem is one of service, installation, manufacturing, design, maintenance, or equipment abuse. Because of the wide disparity in technical competence of the repair personnel, the diagnosis and absolutely necessity of repairs becomes a further issue.
With existing technology, companies do not have the foreknowledge that something has broken in their equipment that will cause it to operate out of acceptable specification within an estimated amount of time. This foreknowledge if it could be had and at a reasonable cost, could give management time to have emergency repairs or formulate a backup plan and also gives quality assurance knowledge of the incident and the opportunity to get involved. With existing technology you will notice problems after the fact. Existing technology does not have a way to tell what has gone wrong and then what to bring to fix it and how long it will take from thousands of locations across the globe. With existing technology you have to send a mechanic on location and hope he will find the problem and not charge too much to fix it, as well as to rely upon his competence and honesty. Without the diagnostic information the company owning the equipment does not know when to schedule the repair, because many times repairs need to be done during off hours. In many instances, service has to show up many different times at a site and this costs the company. The Zero Defect Management for restaurant and other equipment for global access gives companies a way to manage these and other issues efficiently and cost effectively.